Thursday, October 15, 1998

D.M. Thomas: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

First appeared in the Boston Book Review.

(Date approximate).

Each day he went to bed exhausted at seven P.M., to wake
up after one A.M. quite refreshed, and at once resume work. At nine A.M. he
would stop, then move into a whole new day's work, finishing at six when he prepared
a meal. When he became ill and was running a fever, he still chopped wood,
stoked the stove, and did part of his writing standing up, with his back
pressed against the hot tiles of the stove "in lieu of mustard
plasters." His single goal, even should it cost him his life, was to
finish the history of Russia's enslavement.

D.M. Thomas, "Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in
his Life"

HB: Why did you write a biography of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn?

DMT: Well, I was invited to.

HB: But not by the Solzhenitsyn estate.

DMT: No, no, no, absolutely not. They anathematize it;
they curse the book. No, I was asked by an editor at St. Martins Press who
wrote me out of the blue saying the time has come to redo Solzhenitsyn, and I'd
be an interesting person to do it. I felt a mixture of horror and intrigue. The
temptation was that through Solzhenitsyn, you could cover twentieth century
Russian literature as well. So I had two things in mind, Solzhenitsyn and my
love affair with Russia, and it gave me a chance to go over there.

I said I could give two or three years of my life to it,
certainly no more. And he said, that's enough. So with great trepidation, I
plunged in. I thought in some ways I was acting against the grain of my
writing, in that, you know, I like to use my imagination a lot -- the open
road. But on the other hand, I thought his life was a tremendous story, and I'm
a storyteller, so maybe I can use some of novelistic experience to shape it.

I like taking historical figures like Freud, in
"Eating Pavlova," John F. Kennedy in "Flying in to Love",
Freud again in "The White Hotel." I like seeing what I can do
fictionally with a living character, so I thought, well, that's not so far from
taking a living character and sticking to the facts but using my novelistic
experience to shape the story.

HB: Why did Solzhenitsyn open the doors to a previous
biographer, Michael Scammell, ["Solzhenitsyn: a Biography", 1984] but
not to you?

DMT: He thought Scammell was sympathetic. Still, it
wasn't an authorized biography, though he did agree to cooperate to some
extent. However, when Solzhenitsyn knew Scammell was interviewing Natasha, his
first wife, he withdrew cooperation. He was very suspicious of any one who
approached Natasha.

HB: Isn't that a rather Stalinist conception of
biography, the biographer only accesses sources approved in advance?

DMT: Well, indeed, after I thought the book was over I
found I had to spend many months finding out who owned permission for various
things. For two books, "The Gulag Archipelago," and "The Oak and
the Calf", I had to get Solzhenitsyn's permission. So I wrote, asking for
permission and months after I had written, got a letter from his Parisian
agent, who said Mr. Solzhenitsyn declines to give permission for you to quote
from these works. He feels that since you have taken your own decisions as to
who to interview, he has every right not to cooperate in any way with this
book. *I* decide who you'll interview. It's ridiculous.

HB: You didn't get to meet him and write, somewhat
self-effacingly: "He has better things to do with his time than to
cooperate with a biographer; nor do I feel that in a few hours -- the most time
I could have expected to have been granted -- I could have formed a
substantially different impression of him or of his work."

DMT: He something of a control freak. You wouldn't get
through to the man at all in a few hours conversation.

And I think if I met him he might have used that, saying,
see, I cooperated, now I want to see your text, I want to approve it. I could
have said no, but there would have been some pressure on me to compromise. I
felt by his not cooperating, I could at least be independent.

HB: How did your image of him change in the course of
writing the book?

DMT: I think I should not like him as an individual. I
still admire him as a writer, and feel that many of his ideas have been unduly
attacked, but believe that as an individual he could be a pretty egotistical
and arrogant customer who had quarreled with a lot of very nice people.

HB: He's a very different writer than you are.

DMT: But there were some temperamental and biographical
connections. He is a provincial; he grew up in a very remote part of Russia,
Rostov on Don, and that has made him different from the intellectuals of
Moscow. I grew up in Cornwall and have never lived in London, so I was outside
the English establishment. Also, I'm a Celt, which makes me not quite English,
so there was that feeling that I don't belong in the literary and intellectual
circles in London, just as he doesn't quite belong to the literary circles of
Russia.

And I have had the experience of being virtually unknown
until I was in my forties, when I had a sudden experience of relative fame with
"The White Hotel" -- nothing like "Ivan Denisovitch," but
quite considerable, and so I could understand the shock, the excitement of it,
and also some slight alienation. You're not quite the same as you were before.
You haven't changed your writing to suit the public but you're aware you're not
just an isolated writer alone with the page; there are people out there and
they read it.

HB: Are you not about to be more famous now that
"The White Hotel" is being made into a movie?

DMT: Directed by Emir Kusturica who's won two Palme d'Or
awards. Dennis Potter was the screenwriter, and his screenplay was kind of
bizarre. Instead of my heroine being an opera star she becomes a circus act,
because at that point David Lynch was going to direct, and Lynch felt he was
not capable of dealing with European high art; he'd be much happier with a
circus. But I think the director and the producers want to make changes to
Potter's script that will be the basis, and bring it, I hope, a little nearer
to my book.

It will be fun. Making a movie of a book is a translation,
just like translating a poet. You know it's going to be difficult but at least
they're attempting to put my vision on the screen.

HB: Getting back to what you said about coming from the
provinces, it seems you identify liberal democratic views with the metropolis.
If you're outside, you can think of another way to be.

DMT: You can think of another way to be. I don't think
Solzhenitsyn is an extremist, in the way he has been painted by some. Here's a
man who fought against fascism, and wanted the Soviet Empire to shrink, to let
its provinces go. So he's not an imperialist, not a nationalist in that sense.
But he is a very strong patriot. I understand patriotism. I'm a very patriotic
Brit, which doesn't make me in any way denigrate other countries. I approve of
their patriotism, too. I can even get a lump in my throat when I hear "The
Star-Spangled Banner." I get a lump in my throat when I hear Rachmaninoff,
and think I'm a Russian patriot. I can understand and approve of identifying
with a country as somehow the tangible expression of a people.

HB: What about his religiosity? Maybe, under the kind of
duress in which he lived, he needed another framework than liberal democratic
values. The language of liberal politics just doesn't encompass those situations.

DMT: You're absolutely right. The Russian experience is
so bizarre. They never had a Renaissance, for example. I think, also, he needed
some sort of father figure and when Lenin dropped out, God took that place.

As you know, there are two strands in Russian thought.
There are the Slavophiles who think the answer to Russia's problems is in
Russia's soul, They can be obscurantist and dark and holy and superstitious.
And there are the Westernizers -- people like Turgenev and Chekov -- who turn
to the West. Solzhenitsyn is very much on the side of the Slavophiles. Russia
must provide its own answers. Western answers are not necessarily Russian
answers..

But these views of his are a bit of willow-the-wisp. He's
going to be remembered for his great efforts in the fight against tyranny
during the last two decades of Communism. The late views are not reflected in
any literary works that will live. They're just opinions. He's got opinions
like you've got opinions and I've got opinions. Ultimately, they carry no more
weight, whereas his ideas when he wrote "The First Circle",
"Cancer Ward" and "Gulag Archipelago," are strong and valid
because they are embedded in works of art.

HB: What are Solzhenitsyn's strongest qualities as a
writer?

DMT: His power of invective, his power of savage
indictment, of sustained outrage, as in "Gulag Archipelago". Robert
Conquest wrote a book, "The Great Terror," a very fine book. But
because he didn't go through it personally, and he's English, it has a very
rational side. But Solzhenitsyn could bring out the savage irrationality of it,
through his own sustained invective and rage.

And he says, it's boring, yes, one thing after the other,
over and over again. He goes out of his way to say, I know I'm repeating myself
because it happened over and over again. It's an amazing work.

HB: Solzhenitsyn nearly single-handedly broke the tie
between Soviet Communism and the European intelligentsia. The "Gulag
Archipelago" had a shattering impact. There may be comparable examples in
history, but not many. Perhaps the Zola of "J'accuse."

DMT: But in a much narrower framework. Zola had a
terrific effect on France but Solzhenitsyn effected his own country and all the
countries in the West.

HB: Does that also mean he won't be read? Not the way we read
Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. He will be read when we want to remember what Soviet
Communism was like, which most people won't want to do.

DMT: This is the question that lurked in the back of my
mind as I wrote the book. I hesitated quite to say that as baldly as you've
done, but I do suspect he won't be much read in fifty years time.

HB: You do come close to saying that when you write:
"The twentieth century has swallowed up creeds and populations, and left
behind in Russia, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Blok, Shostakovich, Mandelstam,
Tsvelayeva -- and Solzhenitsyn; not, perhaps, great like the others outside of
time, but great in the supreme intersection of his art and his courage with
history."

DMT: The shadow sentence there is that maybe when this
interest in Communism goes, he won't be read.

Twelve, thirteen years ago, I had the feeling Communism
was here forever. And then, within a few years, poof. In a sense, that was what
Solzhenitsyn had been hungering for, working for. Then it happened rendering
some of what he was doing obsolete. All that then lived on was the literary
value of his work, which is considerable in some cases -- "The First
Circle", "Cancer Ward" and, particularly, "Gulag
Archipelago" which I think is a ferocious work. There is an irreducible
element worth reading. But it will lose some of its effect because he was so
rooted in his time.

HB: When you describe Solzhenitsyn writing "The
Wheel," I got the feeling there was something mad about the undertaking,
as if he was trying to stuff all of reality in the book, making the book
substitute for the world.

DMT: What other writer in history has said it's going to
take me twenty years to do this, I've got no time, I've got to go? At most
writers think, well, I'm writing a piece that might take me four or five years
but not the next twenty, and unless it's written I shall have failed.

That obsessional belief in his work did damage. He showed
that if he allowed space in his life for ideas to germinate, he could write
important works. "Cancer Ward" was an idea that just came to him as
he was recovering from cancer, not when he was sitting at his desk writing
feverishly. "Ivan Denisovich" came to him when he was laying bricks,
and his mind had time to wander and daydream. The muse needs that space in
order to come in. And he deliberately left no space. He had no time to go out
and look at America, say, or walk the streets.

HB: Do you think his habit of isolating himself was a
product of suffering in the labor camps? At a certain point he understands they
are his destiny and he no longer seeks an easier position. He knew his role was
to be the chronicler, the witness.

DMT: That's why he deliberately started being
recalcitrant, in order to get sent to one of the harsher camps, a very brave
thing to do in a way, and to be sent away from the scientific institute in
Moscow.

HB: It was at the scientific institute that he became
interested in language, was it not? There's controversy about the way he later
worked with language in "The Red Wheel." Joseph Brodsky said, it
wasn't really Russian; it was a kind of intellectual ur-Russian, not the
language itself. Isn't there's a kind of Heideggerian slant there, throwing out
language as its evolved, as its used, and trying to infuse supposed initial
meanings?

DMT: You could almost say it has affinities with Joyce in
"Finnegans Wake." As Joyce went blind, there was more concentration
on the signs. As Solzhenitsyn went into his remoteness and his solitude, he
thought more about the nature of language. It's a substitute for living, to
some extent.

HB: What are the roots of your own love affair with
Russian literature?

DMT: It probably has a relationship to my being Celtic.
The Celtic is a kind of dreamy poetic race. There are affinities with the
emotional side of Russian, the strong emotions which are rather un-English. But
I also had two years of training in Russian when I was a young soldier. It was
a way of avoiding really being in the army. But, gradually, some great teachers
instilled their love of the language into us. The Russian poetry I heard stayed
in my head. And then I translated Akhmatova, and learned a hell of a lot.

HB: Why the affinity for Russian literature in
particular?

DMT: It's more daring in its ability to switch forms. When
Pasternak wrote "Zhivago," it was unique in having a section of poems
at the end of the book that was related to the prose. I probably have never
known whether I'm a prose writer or a poet. It's Russian experimentation with
form that appeals to me.

HB: There's a strong sense of fate in your work. Things
are not by accident alone. In your memoir, "Memories and
Hallucinations," you say, "Already I had enough examples to convince
me that coincidences are no coincidence. They kept on coming."

It occurs to me you find something comparable in the
Russians. This is what the Russians have working for them, a sense that there's
more than what meets the eye. This is not English empiricism.

DMT: I would agree. English literary life produces great
literature but there isn't that sense of the numinous the Russian writers can
conjure up. They have this feeling of almost literally drawing on the spirits.
Someone like Akhmatova living in terrible poverty and illness and under
persecution thinks of Dante exiled from Florence. She feels a connection with
Dante and conjures it up in the poem called, "Muse."

This drawing strength from the past, from past writers
who also fought, if not against tyranny then at least against authoritarianism,
this sort of almost mystical communion between Russian writers of different
periods is something I admire very much.

HB: You've been fascinated with Freud and psychoanalysis.
Part of it is connected to what we're saying about looking beneath the surface,
seeing the hidden script.

DMT: And seeing how much guilt and anger can be traced
back to childhood events.

HB: You try that approach on Solzhenitsyn, though you're
never completely persuasive.

DMT: I don't suppose it was completely persuasive to me,
either. But if I'd spent the first four years of my life cooped up in a house
with loving but terrifying women who gave me endless attention but who also,
when night fell, would pray that they still would be there in the morning, ,
and then and if my mother left and didn't come back for three years, I would
think that would have some effect on my adult nature. Solzhenitsyn lived in a
Soviet epoch where we assume personal lives just don't matter, but surely that
childhood effected him. I look at some of his adult characteristics -- stubbornness,
determination, parsimony and enormous dedication to work -- and it's
exactly what Freud would have expected.

I take your point, it's not entirely persuasive. But if
you're faced with having to write at least 200,000 words -- that was the lower
limit I was given -- you have to take a few risks.

HB: You give background to the Russian Revolution by
summoning up the horror of World War I.

DMT: And the Civil War.

HB: In other words, evil did not begin with the storming
of the Winter Palace. World War I was the catastrophe that set things in motion
for other catastrophes.

DMT: And, of course, the huge gap in wealth. I was quite
persistent in getting them to reprint two photographs I saw in a book called
"The Russian Century: a Photographic History of Russia's 100 Years"
(1994). There's a scene of a countess's ball in St. Petersburg, 1914. The men
have these arrogant mustached boyish faces, coifed for the camera. Against
that, there was a shot of soup kitchen in St. Petersburg -- bleak factory walls
behind, and these men, some of them with quite intelligent faces, who are
hopeless, who have absolutely no hope. I wanted to put that in so as to show
the Russia out of which the Revolution was born.

HB: Are you relieved to be done?

DMT: Absolutely. I never want to hear the word,
"Solzhenitsyn" again after these next few weeks. I'm hoping that once
I've done the last interview, my mind will be fresh and free to think of
something else.

HB: The biography was a Solzhenitsyn-like labor.

DMT: It was, for a time, going into his mode, grinding it
out. I'd never before in my life set myself a number of words in a day. I
thought I'd never get through this in any reasonable amount of time unless I
wrote at least 1,000 words every day.

The interesting thing now would be to see if he might
write my biography.